Channing Tatum is all over the magazines lately, the most I’ve honestly ever seen in a single week. Fans can find Chan in the latest issues of Details (February 2010), Instyle (February 2010), Entertainment Weekly (January 22nd) for both ‘Dear John‘ and ‘Eagle of the Ninth‘, Intouch (January 25th), AND OK (January 25th) magazine, and you can check out all the high quality scans for each on today’s post in the CTU Photo Gallery.

“…EW chatted with Tatum last week about the movie in question, The Eagle of the Ninth, which Focus Features will release this fall. “It’s almost like an old western, like The Searchers,” Tatum said, while pointing out that the film’s still very much an epic in the tradition of Gladiator and Braveheart. “Are you going to get big, huge battles and things you’d expect in an epic? Yeah, absolutely. But it’s smarter than just a big epic. It’s more of a personal, relationship story about these two guys that have to go on this journey together.”

Tatum plays Marcus Aquila, a Roman army officer in 140 A.D. whose father was the commander of the legendary Ninth Legion — a unit of soldiers that mysteriously disappeared 20 years earlier in the mountains of present-day Scotland while trying to conquer the region’s various Celtic tribes. For Aquila, the legion’s presumed defeat has brought considerable shame to the family, so he decides to embark on a quest into those northern tribal lands in hopes of learning exactly what happened to his dad. Accompanying Aquila is his British slave Esca, played by Jamie Bell (King Kong, Billy Elliot). “They’re really just two broken, lonely people,” said Tatum. “They welcome death, and then they find a reason to live and a purpose and honor through this journey.”

The Eagle of the Ninth is directed by Scottish filmmaker and documentarian Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void), so naturally the movie was shot in Scotland for maximum authenticity. And with authenticity comes extreme weather conditions. “Scotland might have been one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, but it hated us,” Tatum confessed. “I have never imagined conditions like this. You’d look around the set and all you could see would be two inches in front of you. It was raining every single day, and Jamie and I would be on the back of a horse, freezing and soaked to the bone. When you see us cold and tired and shivering in the movie, none of that’s acting!”…”